Town

"It's not awful, just not my taste. Too much running around, and noise and too many choices of things to do. Oh and the folks in town just seem to talk and talk and talk. No one ever just calms down and enjoys the sights quietly. Seems like some of them just want to hear themselves talk. You know what I mean?"

-- the Brooklyn Bunny, in Town Mouse, Country Mouse

--

We'll start rehearsing the next show on Monday. I will play the Brooklyn Bunny (excerpt from one monologue above) and the Country Turtle. The yin and the yang, my next trick.

--

The apartment is cold again in Cincinnati; after a full week of warming weather, the temperature has dropped again. A few nights ago, it snowed an hour south of here. Today, at fifty degrees, the middle of March is feeling a lot like the beginning of January.

Ate a bagel sandwich this morning with egg, cheese and ham. Teresa made it, and I ate it. That's a poem waiting to be written.

--

Watched the first two episodes of HBO's Carnivale last night, and I think I may keep watching. That's something I don't always do when a friend or co-worker suggests a TV show and lends me the box set. I find that often they believe you will like it because they like it, and they also happen to like you, and so you and this show they like are lumped together in the same category of "things I like." Maybe they even like you both for the same reason. So-and-so is quirky, therefore they will enjoy this quirky show; So-and-so likes poop jokes, therefore they should watch "Family Guy."

But the sad reality, in many cases, is that your friends sometimes (and co-workers especially) do not really know you. They know a version of you, the peeled sliver slice you leave on the plate. It's artistic, it's inviting, yes, and it's also not your purest self. Agreed?

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just the way it is. A professor once told me, "If everyone acted the way they wanted, and said what they wanted, right now, civilization would collapse." In the arts, especially theatre (the art in which drama is its greatest plus and its greatest minus, the agent of multiplication as well as division), being honest and vulnerable and completely uncorked--a spewing, flowing, unpolluted river of Yourself--is a little unsettling, and a bit annoying. The empty space is a place for masks, a hovel of safe extroversion. There is room for you, just not all of you. This is work; this is not you. This is you inside a giant box with a stage and seats and a curtain and lights, a metaphorical box created by walls of script pages, a roof of sales, a floor of blocking.

Some people may disagree. Scholars debate. Theatre is a tricky setting in which business takes place, because it is at once a liberating environment and a restricting one. It says, You may run and play as much as you please, but stay in the fence, remain in your pen, do not be so brash as to assume this sort of thing is Okay in the Real World.

Still, it remains one of the only places where whatever slice you peel off yourself and show to your co-workers, it will be observed, understood, savored, and mostly accepted.

(Unless, perhaps, you are a conservative.)

Anyways. I dig Carnivale; I'll keep watching it. Just for the record.